4 ms·

I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UT

by zbuf 4y ago

I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, perhaps. Concise commands for viewing folders, threads, searching, composing etc. Which integrate well with grep, xargs etc. for bulk operations. Rather than IMAP support, the heavy lifting of sync'ing Maildir folders could be done by dovecot, with searches by mairix.

rakoo 4y ago
You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of interest.
- zbuf 4y ago
  I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
  - eduction 4y ago
    Notmuch is fully command line, there are any number of traditional cli commands, it’s a suite ala git but not a tui or anything: https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ See for example notmuch-search and notmuch-tag. Maybe you are thinking of notmuch-emacs or some other full blown client. There are many https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ Notmuch’s core is largely in C and I believe the only serious dependency is Xapian.
    - zbuf 4y ago
      Don't panic, I was just confused as I followed the "Screenshots" link and was presented with a bunch of interactive views in Emacs. But still, I've encountered this before.
      - eduction 4y ago
        Ya use what you like, the more of these tools the better, just setting record straight on notmuch as I use the cli every day via scripts
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    > Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. You must be completely confused with some other tool. notmuch is a command line tool.
shakow 4y ago
Ironically enough (as it's not CLI, merely TUI), I find notmuch interface for emacs to fullfill this criterion.
stevekemp 4y ago
Back in the day I wrote my own console based mail-client, scriptable with lua. It worked really well for my needs. I did dabble afterwards with some simple utilities for scripting mail, showing a list of folders, showing a list of messages in a folder, or viewing a single mail. After spending so long working on my own client I could never be enthusiastic enough to really take it much further, but for reference the tools still work, against a local Maildir hierarchy: https://github.com/skx/maildir-tools https://github.com/skx/maildir-tools

by zbuf 4y ago

rakoo 4y ago

You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of interest.

zbuf 4y ago
I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
- eduction 4y ago
  Notmuch is fully command line, there are any number of traditional cli commands, it’s a suite ala git but not a tui or anything: https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/ See for example notmuch-search and notmuch-tag. Maybe you are thinking of notmuch-emacs or some other full blown client. There are many https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ Notmuch’s core is largely in C and I believe the only serious dependency is Xapian.
  - zbuf 4y ago
    Don't panic, I was just confused as I followed the "Screenshots" link and was presented with a bunch of interactive views in Emacs. But still, I've encountered this before.
    - eduction 4y ago
      Ya use what you like, the more of these tools the better, just setting record straight on notmuch as I use the cli every day via scripts
- BeetleB 4y ago
  > Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. You must be completely confused with some other tool. notmuch is a command line tool.

shakow 4y ago

Ironically enough (as it's not CLI, merely TUI), I find notmuch interface for emacs to fullfill this criterion.

stevekemp 4y ago

Back in the day I wrote my own console based mail-client, scriptable with lua. It worked really well for my needs. I did dabble afterwards with some simple utilities for scripting mail, showing a list of folders, showing a list of messages in a folder, or viewing a single mail. After spending so long working on my own client I could never be enthusiastic enough to really take it much further, but for reference the tools still work, against a local Maildir hierarchy: https://github.com/skx/maildir-tools https://github.com/skx/maildir-tools